Making and Reshaping Musical Instruments — Following the trends of musical instrument inventions.

Future of Musical Instrument Manufacturing @Ponoko @Kickstarter #kyub

The Kyub kickstarter is the cutting edge blueprint for manufacturing musical instruments.

Presellling and Idea Validation

By using kickstarter, the Kyub team is able to see if there is a market for their product. The Kyub is a way cool esoteric MIDI controller, that is beloved by a small group of people. Kickstarter allows the team to test the viability of the product before making more devices, and assembling additional product support resources.

Promote Through Social Media

Kickstarter is inherently social media friendly. Viewers (like us) can easily share the concept of their product, and spread it through more channels to reach a wider audience and solicit feedback along the way. Facebook. Twitter. The unique kyub name makes it easy to find their work.

Outsource Manufacturing

The laser cutting is done on demand by Ponoko. Our experiences using local fabrication shops have been less than pleasant. Machines are constantly down or have a backlogged schedule. The amount of set-up time, materials and machine costs make in-house manufacturing difficult. To make fiscal sense for in-house manufacturing, it requires one operator working with multiple machines and have a huge run. Or the project has unique materials requirements.

Ponoko provides instant scalability, solves the problems of having outdated or broken equipment and is price competitive. Shapeways and other competitors help maintain flexibility in the supply chain.

Go Big Volume, Or Go Home

Electronics prices go down with increased volume. Significantly. Kyub set their goals at $20,000 with products costing between $65 and $250. If they hit a run of 200 units, it allows them to bulk order components, and pass on the massive savings to their consumer.

Open Source: Progress with The Audience

For small run devices, it is vital for a community to form around the design of the device. By making the software open source, people can customize the functionality of the device and release new iterations and ways to play the device. This is appealing for the target audience. And it allows the group to build a customer base for future products.

Oops. Is it August already? Just browsing through my favs–guess it has been a while. Better late than never I suppose. The Kickstarter didn’t make its goal but a bunch of people moved over to Celery and we did a mini-run of about 60 units. http://www.kyubmusic.com. Hope to have something new to show in a few months so we may give this another try.